SISC 1.13.4 Released

4/10/2005: SISC 1.13.4 Released

New in this Release
-------------------

Version 1.13.4 strives to simplify development in a variety
of situations, especially in one of SISC's strengths,
as a language embedded in other Java applications.  As
usual however, there are functional enhancements and
bug fixes.

* Simplified Java to Scheme initialization and context
  management, including making most steps optional.
* Support for hash tables with arbitrary equivalence and
  hash functions, weak keys, and hashtable reflection.
* Support for character ports creation from any binary port.
* Fixed UTF8 support throughout, and made the character/binary
  port distinction more consistent.
* Support for direct-to-buffer I/O, similar to string ports
  but for binary data.
* Added support for SRFIs 61, 67, 69, and applied bug fixes
  for SRFIs 13, 14, and 43 from the authors.
* Added non-generative records, which are consistently serializable.
* Added generic interned values support.
* All SISC types now have corresponding types values in the
  type-system.
* Made all SRFIs consistently based in a SISC module,
  including natively supported ones.
* Improved error reporting, especially for load.
* Many other bug fixes.
About SISC
----------

SISC is an extensible heap-based interpreter of Scheme running on
the Java VM, with an aggressively optimized, lightweight (<200k)
Scheme engine.  SISC outperforms all existing Java
interpreters (often by more than an order of magnitude), and is
competitive with interpreters in any language.

In addition, SISC is a complete implementation of the language.
The entire R5RS Scheme standard is supported, without exception.
This includes a full number tower including complex number support,
arbitrary precision integers and floating point numbers, as well as
hygienic R5RS macros, proper tail recursion, and first-class
serializable continuations (not just the escaping continuations as
in many limited Scheme systems).  SISC also attempts to implement the
standard as correctly as possible, while still providing
exceptional performance.

Finally, SISC provides many useful real-world extensions, such as
networking, threading, elegant exception handling, generic
procedures, an object system, SLIB and comprehensive SRFI support, a
scope-friendly module system, a Scheme and Java object system
with a clean foreign-function interface and more.


Downloads and More Information
------------------------------

Source code, binaries, and SISC documentation can be found on
the web at:

    http://sisc.sourceforge.net

Special Thanks
--------------

Thanks go out to the following people who contributed to
this release:

Marco Bakera
Michael Benfield
Dominique Boucher
Alessandro Colomba
Chris Dean
Chris Double
Tony Garnock-Jones
Norman Gray
Victor Rodriguez
John Russell
Yohanes Santoso
Ben Simon
Lindsay Smith
Andrew Wilcox
Danny Yoo


Licensing
---------

SISC is Free Software.  It is released simultaneously under the GNU
General Public License (for free-software projects), and the Mozilla
Public License (for commercial entities).  The documentation is
available under the GPL.